Sweet Laurel Falls

by RaeAnne Thayne

  His father was still not quite seventy. Jack imagined without the pallor he would still be fairly hale and hearty. Still, the old man felt almost frail as he and Maura supported him toward a plump armchair in the nearby travel section.

  “What’s going on?”

  At the new voice, he looked over and found Sage gazing at the three of them in puzzled consternation.

  “Mr. Lange is feeling a little under the weather,” Maura replied. “He passed out.”

  “I didn’t pass out,” Harry snapped. “I just lost my balance. If you left a person with half a foot of aisle room in this place, I would have been fine.”

  “See, that definitely sounds like you’re blaming me. Should I be calling my lawyer?” Maura returned.

  “I’m not going to sue anybody.”

  Don’t believe him, he wanted to tell Maura. If Harry saw any advantage to himself in a given situation, he wouldn’t hesitate to lie, steal and betray to get his way.

  “O. M. G.!”

  Maura blinked at Sage’s sudden exclamation. “What?”

  “If Jack is my father, that means Mr. Lange is my grandfather!”

  He bit back a four-letter word. Of all the moments for Sage to blurt out that little bit of information!

  Harry’s eyes widened and he looked back and forth between the two of them. Maura was the one who had turned pale now. She looked as if she wanted to disappear behind a bookshelf, and Jack wanted to join her.

  Harry did not need this information, something else he could figure out how to manipulate for his own purposes.

  “What did she say?” Harry asked.

  “Nothing,” Maura muttered. “Now would be a really good time for you to go back to sleep.”

  “Who are you?” Harry asked Sage, his thick eyebrows arched like bristly caterpillars.

  “My daughter,” Maura said quickly.

  He narrowed his gaze. “Your daughter died in that car accident up Silver Strike Reservoir this spring. I was there, wasn’t I? I saw the whole thing.”

  That was news to Jack. What had been his father’s involvement in the accident that killed Layla Parker?

  “This is my older daughter, Sage.”

  He should just keep his mouth zipped here. He knew damn well telling him about Sage was a mistake—but he also knew Harry well enough to be certain he would just keep pushing and pushing until somebody told him.

  “And mine, apparently,” Jack finally said.

  Maura sent him a quick, surprised look, as if she expected him to deny the whole thing. Harry, on the other hand, just stared.

  “Have you taken a DNA test?” he asked.

  None of your damn business, he wanted to say. He didn’t want his father mixed up in this complicated mess, but he was coming to realize he didn’t have much control over things. Harry just might have more contact with Sage than he would. He lived in Hope’s Crossing, after all. While Jack would be back in San Francisco, Harry would be free to pick up the phone whenever Sage was in town and meet her for lunch at the café or the resort or any blasted place he wanted.

  “She’s my daughter. I’m convinced of it, and that’s all that matters.”

  Harry opened his mouth to argue, but before he could, the door to the bookstore burst open, and a pair of burly paramedics hurried inside with emergency kits and dedicated focus.

  “Back here,” Maura called and waved. They shifted directions and headed toward them.

  “I don’t need the damn paramedics,” Harry grumbled.

  “Well, you’ve got them,” Maura retorted. “Hey, Dougie.”

  One of the paramedics, a guy who looked like he could probably bench-press half the bookstore, grinned at her. “Hey, Maur. What have we got?”

  “Maybe nothing. I don’t know. I just thought it would be better to call you to check things out.”

  “That’s what we’re here for. What happened?”

  “Mr. Lange isn’t feeling well. He had some kind of incident. We were talking one moment and he fell over the next. I think he was unconscious for about thirty seconds to a minute.”

  “I didn’t pass out,” Harry asserted. “I just lost my balance.”

  “And then went to the Bahamas for the next little while,” Jack answered.

  “Either way, it’s a good idea to check things out,” the other paramedic said.

  “That’s what I figured,” Maura answered. “He hit his head on a table pretty hard when he fell.”

  She stepped away from Harry and let the paramedics do their thing.

  “Is he going to be okay?” Sage asked him, her voice low.

  He figured his father would be harassing the paramedics all the way to the hospital, haranguing them on everything from their driving to the accommodations. “It’s just a precaution. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

  For the first time, he noticed Sage looked a little pale too. This had to be weird for her, to find herself suddenly related to the old bastard.

  “I don’t need a stupid gurney.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Lange. We have to follow the rules.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “You can always refuse treatment,” Dougie, Maura’s friend, said to Harry.

  Jack fully expected his father would do just that, but after a pause, Harry shrugged. “No. I’ll come. I don’t want to see the idiots in the E.R., though. Call Dr. Osaka and tell him to meet us there.”

  “Whatever you say, sir.”

  A moment later, the paramedics finally succeeded in loading Harry onto the gurney and rolled him out of the bookstore.

  “Are you going to follow the ambulance to the hospital?” Maura asked.

  “He doesn’t need me. He’s made that more than clear.” He turned to Sage. “So we’re meeting for dinner. What time works for you?”

  She still looked a little green around the gills, and he had a feeling food was the last thing on her mind. “Well, I was thinking I could work until four or so. Any time after that?”

  “Let’s say six-thirty. I’ll pick you up at your house.”

  “Great. I’ll see you then.”

  He picked up his jacket, shook it off from being on the ground, then shrugged into it. With a stiff nod to Maura, he headed out into the snow-crusted streets of Hope’s Crossing.

  The encounter with Harry served as a stark reminder of everything he’d been thinking. What the hell did he know about being a father? When he was a kid, his own example had been distant, preoccupied with work, then increasingly sharp—bordering on cruel—as Jack had reached adolescence.

  By the time his mother eventually took her own life out of despair and loneliness and mental illness, Harry had given up any effort at establishing a relationship and had shown nothing but disdain for him.

  Maybe Jack ought to just cut Sage a break now and slip back out of her life as quickly as he had come. She hadn’t had a chance yet to establish any real feelings for him. She had her mother, her grandmother, a strong support network here in Hope’s Crossing. Why on earth did she need him?

  He stopped himself before he could go further down that road. The idea of leaving now, after he had only just found her, was unbearable. He wanted to be a father to her, in whatever limited capacity he could manage.

  If that meant achieving some sort of peaceful accord with Maura, he was willing to do that too. He had to think that somewhere inside the prickly, sad-eyed woman she had become were some traces of the smart, funny, tender girl she had once been.

  He was willing to do whatever might be necessary to find her again.

  * * *

  COMPARED TO THE EXCITEMENT of an ambulance and paramedics and a wobbly Harry Lange, the rest of Maura’s day seemed depressingly uneventful.

  Even with the hectic holiday season and the various challenges it presented to a business owner—the crowds and the chaos and even a couple of teenage shoplifters she had to turn over to Riley—she found that every day seemed very much like the one before. Tomorrow would probably be more of t
he same.

  Every once in a while she had a wild urge to do something crazy. To leave the store and take off cross-country skiing for the day, or drive into Denver for some retail therapy, or just walk away from everything and catch a flight to some secluded beach in Mexico.

  She was grateful for her job and her business, for the comfort of routine. But she still sometimes wanted to chuck everything and escape, even in the middle of the holidays.

  She looked around the store. It was nearly six-thirty, and the crowd had thinned a great deal as people headed home or to one of the many restaurants for dinner in Hope’s Crossing. They would probably see a bit of a spike again in about an hour, but nothing to compare to the afternoon crowds.

  “Sierra, do you think you and Joe can handle the registers by yourselves?”

  “Absolutely, Maur,” her employee assured her, flipping stick-straight blond hair out of her eyes. “We’re totally dead now. Go home and grab some dinner and put your feet up and watch something brainless on TV!”

  That idea sounded really lovely, if only she didn’t have about four hours of paperwork to do. But one of her favorite things about being a small-business owner was that she could do said paperwork at home with her feet up on the coffee table if she wanted—or even if she didn’t want to.

  “I think that’s just what I’ll do. Thanks for everything today.”

  “No prob. See you tomorrow.”

  Maura headed back to her office to pick up her laptop. On impulse, she sat down and grabbed the phone and quickly dialed the number to the Hope’s Crossing hospital, a small forty-bed unit that served the town and the smaller surrounding communities.

  “Yes, I’m checking on a patient. Harry Lange,” she told the operator.

  “Are you a family member of Mr. Lange’s?”

  Does being the recently discovered baby mama of his estranged son count? She sincerely doubted it. “No,” she had to confess.

  “In that case, I’m afraid I can’t release any information on Mr. Lange’s condition. I’m sorry.”

  “I understand. Can you transfer me to his room?” That would at least let her know if he had been admitted.

  “Yes. Hold on a moment, please.”

  So he was still there. She wasn’t sure why she cared about the man’s condition, as demanding and arrogant and downright unpleasant as she found him. Much to her chagrin, some stupid part of Maura actually felt a little sorry for Harry Lange. Despite having everything most people thought necessary for a life to be deemed a success, Harry’s unhappiness was palpable. His own choices had left him sour and bombastic and bitterly alone.

  Apparently one of those choices was to ignore the phone in his hospital room. The phone rang eight times in the room before she was bounced back to the chirpy operator. “I’m afraid there’s no answer in that room.”

  “I’ll call back. Thank you.”

  She hung up the phone. Maybe she ought to swing by to check on him. She frowned at the thought. Why would she even consider it, except for the fact that he had been standing in her store when he’d had his little incident?

  Harry Lange was none of her business. She should despise everything about the man—because of him, Jack had turned his back on all they might have had together.

  “Trouble with a vendor?”

  She turned at her mother’s voice and found Mary Ella in the doorway. She looked bright and pretty in a turtleneck with her little reading glasses hanging by a new beaded chain Maura hadn’t seen before. If she could look half as smart and put-together as her mother when she had six decades under her belt she would consider herself blessed.

  “Not a vendor. I was just calling the hospital to check on Harry Lange.”

  Mary Ella’s finely arched eyebrows shot way up. “Okay, that statement is just wrong on so many levels. What happened to that old son of a—er, monkey? And why on earth would you be calling to find out about it?”

  “You hadn’t heard? I figured the gossip would have spread all over town by now.”

  “I’ve been at home working on that quilt I’m making for Rose’s oldest and cleaning the house before they get here next week. I haven’t talked to a soul. What happened?”

  “How’s the quilt coming?”

  “Fine. Now, what happened to Harry?”

  Her mother’s urgency made her blink. Mary Ella despised Harry. They had a long-standing feud and could barely tolerate being in the same room with each other on the few community occasions where that might be necessary.

  “This morning he stopped into the bookstore to pick up a special order. Wouldn’t you know it, he walked in just as Jack was about to leave. Seeing his long-lost son must have been too much for him. I don’t know if it was shock or disgust or something else, but he stumbled a little, hitting his head on one of the display tables. Considering he passed out for a moment, I insisted on calling the paramedics.”

  Mary Ella sank into one of her visitor chairs. “Is he all right?”

  “Privacy laws, remember? They can’t tell me anything. He seemed fine when the paramedics came. He was sitting up and snapping at everyone before the paramedics made him go to the hospital.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Because Harry is a bastard. You’re the first one standing in line to call him that.”

  “I am, aren’t I?” Mary Ella murmured.

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’ll be stomping around town bossing people around before we know it.” Maura decided to change the subject. She had spent enough time worrying about Harry Lange—and his progeny—today. “So what brings you here? Isn’t it the Beadapalooza over at String Fever?”

  Claire’s annual event attracted beaders from around the county, drawn to slashed prices and the great offers on bead kits. It was usually the perfect way to de-stress from the holidays, with the bonus of allowing people the opportunity to make a few last-minute gifts.

  “Exactly. That’s why I’m here. Claire sent me over to see if you are coming.”

  She refused to feel guilty for skipping this year. The book club the night before had been more than enough socializing for her. She thought about trying to come up with an excuse to appease her mother, but finally opted for the truth.

  “Mom, this whole thing with Jack… I’m just not ready to face everyone again. It’s been bad enough this year since Layla… Well, it’s been bad enough. And now this. I can’t bear to have everybody talking about me and Jack and our history together now. I’m going to pass. Please give my love to Claire. Next year will be better.” She hoped.

  “Oh, honey.” Mary Ella’s mouth trembled and Maura really hoped her mother wouldn’t start crying, because then she would start crying.

  They were both saved by a bustling outside the door, then a strange, squeaky sound. A moment later, Sage appeared in the doorway. “Oh, good. You are still here. Are you leaving soon? I was hoping I could catch a ride home with you.”

  She frowned. Sage had on her red peacoat, but it looked bulky and unnatural. Maybe she was hiding a Christmas present under there. Maura ordered herself not to ask, though she really hated secrets. “I thought you were having dinner with your, er, with Jack tonight.”

  “We changed our plans. He called just after I left the store this afternoon and said his assistant scheduled a couple of conference calls and he couldn’t get out of them. I think he felt really bad, but I’m cool with it. He’s picking me up for breakfast tomorrow. Right after I hung up with him, Josie texted me. She’s back from UCLA for the holidays, so we’ve been hanging out at her house.”

  “Oh, how is Josie? Is she liking Stanford?”

  “She’s good. I guess she likes it okay, but all she wanted to talk about was her new boyfriend. James. Not Jamie or Jim or Jimmy. James. He’s a senior in pre-med and sounds boring as hell.”

  Maura saw her mother bite her lip to fight back a smile. She wanted to chide Sage for swearing, especially in front of her grandmother, but since she did the same all too often, she
didn’t feel that she had much standing.

  “Don’t you have any boring boyfriends to talk about?” Mary Ella asked.

  Sage’s expression suddenly grew closed, as it did whenever Maura asked the same thing. “Oh, you know how it is. I don’t have time for much of a social life. I’ve got to ace my generals, or I won’t be able to get into the undergraduate environmental planning program.”

  That mysterious squeak sounded again. It was definitely coming from Sage’s direction. Was it a burp? Maura looked closer, but her daughter adjusted her arms a little and gave the two of them a casual smile. “Can you believe Josie is thinking about changing her major again? This will be like her fourth time.”

  “You should be fortunate you’ve always known you wanted to be an architect,” Mary Ella said.

  Sage’s torso suddenly wiggled oddly, and she moved as if someone had just tickled her ribs.

  “All right. What’s going on, Sage?”

  Her daughter put on the same innocent face she used to wear when Maura would walk into her room and find crayon marks on the wall. “What makes you think something is going on?”

  “I don’t know. Either you’ve got an alien inside your coat or a serious case of indigestion.”

  Sage sighed and unzipped her peacoat. A furry little tan face peeked out cheerfully. “Josie brought a shih tzu puppy home from college. I guess she got in trouble at school for having it in the dorm and thought she could convince her parents to keep it here, but they already have three dogs and don’t want another one.”

  “No,” Maura said without hesitation. “Absolutely not.”

  “Come on, Mom. Look how adorable this face is. How can you say no?” Sage lifted the tiny puppy about four inches away from Maura. The animal looked like an Ewok, cuddly and cute. As she looked into those little black eyes, the puppy titled its head and stretched its mouth out in what looked suspiciously like a grin.